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spectacles he’d performed for his friends in college: withoutwarning, one sophomore evening, he had stripped himself of all clothes and run a lap around fraternity row. Electric and seduced by this memory, Frederick had done it again, or something like it. Out he marched, from the cottage that night, wearing nothing but George Carlyle’s raincoat. And then up Providence Road to Route 109, where he opened the coat to each passing car, making of his body a carnal punch line.
    He had done it again, assuming it would conclude as it had twenty years before: with hysterical laughter and a few comical expressions of disdain. Perhaps, at worst, the memory of the incident would earn a placement at the top of his regretful, hung-over inventory of misdeeds the next morning. Instead, as the next morning came, Frederick was bound, literally and figuratively, for the Mayflower Home, spending the final hour of the night and the first of the day in the backseat of a New Hampshire state police vehicle. But it was only after Frederick had sobered and arrived at Mayflower that every moment began to feel gravid with consequence. He had been perplexed then, wanted only to accommodate, to downplay, to be amenable. He had simply believed, even when they arrived at the Mayflower Home, even when he signed his own admission papers, that all could be and would be reversed. Frederick could not have imagined an act as inconsequential, as utterly frivolous, as flashing two old ladies on a small country road in New Hampshire would have a resonance measured in years (indeed, in generations). How could he have? A few inches of a raincoat’s material held one direction at one moment, it seems, has permanently altered his remaining years on this planet.
    A cow walks before Frederick and the nurse, offers a skeptical gaze, and moves on. The nurse tells Frederick she needs to get back to help out with checks.
    Frederick knows what awaits him in Ingersoll: another Miltown haze, men’s screams, and the smoky, greasy drabness, like a bowling alley in the midafternoon. When he is inside his room, when his mind has adjusted to his place, he will be able to bear it. But still, each time he returns, it is an only slightly dulled reenactment of the morning he was first led into Ingersoll. For there they are now, passing through the ward’s front doors, confronted with the same screams that greeted Frederick that first morning. The same catatonics clutching the common room’s corners, either silenced by or enraged at their private sounds and visions. The same airless corridor; to open a window a massive undertaking, given the cages, the locks. The same cigarette vapors, clinging to the men like their madness, always visible, harmful, emanating. Once back to his room, the same crush of solitude, loneliness not merely a concept or a feeling, but a palpable physical presence. It is all the same, except for the awareness he possesses now that he did not, somehow, when he was first admitted.
    The morning he had signed those forms, Frederick had seen his admission as a simple, if embarrassing, way to avoid police charges. It then seemed a choice between a stint at the local lockup or a few days in the nuthouse. He did not understand—no, not for another week, until Wallace, after Frederick’s repeated demands, finally put his questions about Frederick’s marriage and his mother on hold to answer him directly. Because the police had brought him there, Frederick had signed a modified version of the voluntary admission form. A modification that meant that his leaving Mayflower would require the approval of the psychiatrist in chief, who presently seemed to have no interest in his speedy exit. Frederick had given his freedom over to something far worse than the judicial system. Here, his psychiatristwas judge and jury, the case on trial, his sanity. And what recourse? Other patients have told Frederick that he could attempt a plea for his release from the board of